Say for instance that you have 10 variables containing what "fruits" you ate today. These would be written in text for some reason.

Now if you add all 10 to automatic recode with the String variables in one end and their new name for becoming numeric you can then let the computer automatically code them to numeric fields. You can also choose how to handle "empty" as seen in screenshot and if you want same coding scheme for all vars. So what it would do is check for "bananas" in all vars, give them a code and then add that code to the new numeric var and add the label for it like 1 = "Bananas".

It is probably pretty easy to implement and a very practical function at that.

What would be good to superseed what SPSS has is obviously ignore case (uncertain if in there) and possibly fonetic matching etc. But in the short term the original feature is of value ofcourse.

Another function missing which is probably not that difficult to implement and that is fairly functional. A possible tweak that would make it more powerful than SPSS implementation would be to save "translationlist" as syntax or similar so that it can reused at a later stage or used as syntax.